Haig-Brown Roderick Langmere

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Situated on the banks of the Campbell River, the former home or Roderick Haig-Brown and his family was known as Above Tide. Now owned by the City of Campbell River and called the Haig-Brown Heritage House, it is managed by the Campbell River Museum and operates as Bed and Breakfast from May to October. As one of the province's few designated literary landmarks, it hosts a Writer in Residence program, in partnership with Canada Council, from December to April each year. A highlight of public tours that can be arranged through the museum is the extensive private library of Roderick Haig-Brown who credited his wife, Ann Haig-Brown, who typed his manuscripts, as being the family's superior intellectual.

QUICK REFERENCE ENTRY:

The Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize for best book contributing to the understanding and appreciation of British Columbia is named in honour of the Campbell River angler and essayist. His name will also endure for his foresight as a conservationist long before the word "environment"; became common. He once wrote, "Can man make a rational response to his knowledge of the environment? Can he become sensitive, generous, and considerate to his world and the other creatures that share it with him, or is his nature immutably rooted in blood, sex and darkness?";

To favour any one of the 26 Haig-Brown titles between Silver: The Life Story of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) to The Salmon (1974), one might well agree with the editors of the anthology Genius of Place (2000) and select his meditations on life and nature near the midway point of his career, Measure of the Year (1950). In an excerpt entitled "Let Them Eat Sawdust,"; he writes: "I think there has never been, in any state, a conservationist government, because there has never been a people with sufficient humility to take conservation seriously. . . . Conservation means fair and honest dealing with the future, usually at some cost to the immediate present."; A juvenile novel, Starbuck Valley Winter (1943), has been cited as Haig-Brown's bestselling title. An angling classic, A River Never Sleeps (1946), guides the reader through the course of a fictional fishing year, visiting different rivers month by month. Adult novels Timber (1942) and On the Highest Hill (1949) concern life in the logging camps.

Roderick Haig-Brown was born in 1908 in Sussex, England. His mother was from a wealthy family in the brewery business. As a teenager, Haig-Brown met Thomas Hardy. A family friend, Major Greenhill, inspired his refined appreciation for hunting and fishing. Expelled from Charterhouse School for drinking and unsanctioned absenteeism, he persuaded his mother to send him to Seattle to visit his uncle, promising to return when he was of an age to apply for entry into the civil service. After working in a lumber camp in Washington State, he came north to avoid visa problems, spending three years in the Nimpkish Lake area of Vancouver Island, variously employed as a logger, guide and fisherman.

In Seattle he had met his future wife Ann Elmore, also born in 1908. They married in 1934 and took up residence on the banks of the Campbell River where they lived until their deaths: Roderick in 1976 and Ann in 1990. Their "Above Tide"; residence is preserved as a heritage site. Valerie Haig-Brown edited some of her father's books; Alan and Celia Haig-Brown are significant authors.

The pipe-smoker with a hyphenated name never attended university, but Haig-Brown served ably as a lay magistrate for northern Vancouver Island from 1941 until 1974. He also served as Chancellor of the University of Victoria from 1970 to 1973. E. Bennett Metcalfe published a controversial but intriguing biography called A Man of Some Importance (1985) "to rescue Haig-Brown from the myth-makers."; It was loathed and fiercely repressed by Haig-Brown's widow. Anthony Robertson, Valerie Haig-Brown and Robert Cave have produced more laudatory books.

FULL ENTRY:

The Roderick Haig-Brown Book Prize for the best book contributing to the understanding and appreciation of British Columbia is named in honour of the Campbell River lay magistrate and essayist Roderick Haig-Brown who became known around the world for his writing about fishing and the environment.

To favour any one of the 26 Haig-Brown titles between Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) to The Salmon (1974), one might well agree with the editors of the B.C. non-fiction anthology Genius of Place (2000) and select his meditations on life and nature near the midway point of his career, Measure of the Year (1950). In an except entitled 'Let Them Eat Sawdust,' he writes: "I think there has never been, in any state, a conservationist government, because there has never been a people with sufficient humility to take conservation seriously... Conservation means fair and honest dealing with the future, usually at some cost to the immediate present.";

Roderick Haig-Brown was born on February 21, 1908, in Lancing, Sussex, England, the grandson of a Charterhouse School headmaster and the son of a teacher and writer, Alan Haig-Brown. His father Alan was killed as a World War II soldier in 1918, but Roderick retained lasting veneration for him as "an Edwardian: one of the young, the strong, the brave and the fair who had faith in their nation, their world and themselves."; His mother Violet Mary Pope was from a wealthy family in the brewery business. As a teenager, Roderick Haig-Brown met Thomas Hardy and later regretted not getting to know him better. A family friend, Major Greenhill, was his main influence for developing his refined appreciation for hunting and fishing. Expelled from Charterhouse School for drinking and unsanctioned absenteeism, he persuaded his mother to send him to Seattle to visit his uncle, promising to return when he was of an age to apply for entry into the civil service. After working in a lumber camp in Washington state, he came north to Canada to avoid visa problems, spending three years in the Nimpkish Lake area of Vancouver Island variously employed as a logger, guide and fisherman. He returned to live in London, England in 1931, the same year he published his first book, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon.

In Seattle he had met his future wife Ann Elmore, born on May 3, 1908 and raised in Seattle. They married in 1934 and took up residence on the banks of the Campbell River where they both lived until their deaths (Roderick October, 19, 1976; Ann 1990). Their 'Above Tide' residence has been preserved as a heritage site. Roderick Haig-Brown and Ann were devoted to the protection of B.C. rivers, particularly those on which wild salmon are dependent for their survival. He was a trustee of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, an advisor to the BC Wildlife Federation, a senior advisor to Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Flyfishers and a member of Federal Fisheries Development Council and the International Pacific Salmon Commission. In addition, Roderick Haig-Brown served as a lay magistrate for the northern Vancouver Island region from 1941 until 1974 even though the pipe-smoking Englishman with a hyphenated name had never attended university. He had friendships with influential members of the UBC English department, who sometimes visited on fishing trips, but for many years he was partially reliant on cheques from his family in England. In addition, Haig-Brown served as Chancellor of the University of Victoria from 1970 to 1973.

Roderick Haig-Brown wrote many natural history and conservation books as well as several novels and collections of essays. His adult novels Timber and On the Highest Hill concern life in the logging camps and wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. In the former, based on his own experiences in the woods, Haig-Brown writes of the friendship between two loggers and their involvement in the union movement. In the latter, Colin Ensley, a shy and solitary young man, is deeply in love with a woman and with the northwest woods, leading to a tragic conclusion. In his attempt to write a novel of social criticism, Haig-Brown, the conservationist, can be viewed as a post-D.H. Lawrence philosopher, protesting what Laurie Ricou has called 'the machine in the garden'. Haig-Brown's work continues to be reprinted, particularly titles pertaining to fishing.

E. Bennett (Ben) Metcalfe published a controversial but intriguing biography called A Man of Some Importance "to rescue Haig-Brown from the myth-makers."; It was loathed and repressed by Haig-Brown's widow, a fierce protector of his reputation. Campbell River publisher Neil Cameron and fishing expert Van Egan, a long-time friend of Haig-Brown, are preparing a new memoir by Van Egan about Haig-Brown, whose best known titles, according to family historian Valerie Haig-Brown, are A River Never Sleeps and Measure of the Year. Revered as an angling classic, A River Never Sleeps guides the reader through the course of a fictional fishing year, visiting different rivers month by month, starting with steelhead fishing, gradually leading down to the sea and the spawning of salmon. Reprinted many times, it is concurrently an almanac of his fishing life from English chalkstreams of his youth to the unspoiled rivers of streams of the Pacific Northwest.

According to bibliographer Robert Bruce Cave, the biggest selling single edition of any book he wrote was the second American edition of Starbuck Valley Winter which reputedly sold 80,000 copies between 1949 and 1956. In 2000, Cave privately published an exhaustive inventory of Haig-Brown's literary work entitled Roderick Haig-Brown: A Descriptive Bibliography.

According to researcher Andrew Irvine, who extensively researched an article for Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada entitled Bibliographical Errata Regarding the Cumulative List of Winners of the Governor General's Literary Awards, Roderick Haig-Brown received the first and only Governor General's Citation for Juvenile Literature for his 1948 book, Saltwater Summer, rather than the traditional medal that was accorded thereafter. His name has subsequently been omitted from the official list of winners that is maintained by the Canada Council for the Arts. Since 1936, the venerable Governor General's Awards long remained the foremost literary prizes in Canada until the onset of the glitzy, lucrative Giller Prize stole the spotlight.

At the Campbell River Museum visitors can watch a documentary film on the life of Roderick Haig-Brown, Fisherman's Fall, in the 30-seat Van Isle Theatre.

Two of his four children, Alan and Celia Haig-Brown, have become significant authors of books pertaining to British Columbia.

REVIEW

Roderick Langmere Haig-Brown (1908-1976) gained an international reputation for his meditative books on fly fishing on Vancouver Island's Nimpkish and Campbell rivers.

In 1936, Haig-Brown and his wife Ann Elmore moved to a house on the south bank of the Campbell River, just west of the town of that name, where they raised their daughters Valerie, Mary, and Celia, and son Alan.

Haig-Brown emerged as an environmentalist during his fruitless attempt to stop the British Columbia Power Commission from building a dam on Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park in 1958.

Written soon after the family's move to Campbell River, Alison's Fishing Birds remained unpublished until 1980, when Vancouver's Colophon Books published a limited edition of 500 hardcover copies of this children's book.

It is now published here as an accessible trade paperback by Caitlin Press with an introduction by Valerie Haig-Brown, foreword by Andrew Nikiforuk, and illustrations by Sheryl McDougald and Jim Rimmer. -- Ed

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It was the familiar name -- Roderick Haig-Brown -- that drew me to Alison's Fishing Birds.

Haig-Brown authored several substantial books that, as a conservation biologist working on the B.C. coast, I'd read and valued, including The Western Angler: An Account of Pacific Salmon and Western Trout in British Columbia(Derrydale Press, 1939), and The Living Land: An Account of the Natural Resources of British Columbia(Macmillan, 1961).

His name had been mentioned often enough by other scientists and conservationists of my generation and older for me to appreciate his legacy as a writer with a solid and lasting reputation.

Therefore I appreciated the chance to review Alison's Fishing Birds with its vivid and artfully rendered illustrations by Sheryl McDougald and contributions by Valerie Haig-Brown and Andrew Nikiforuk.

Clues discerned by Valerie date the book's origin to 1939 or 1940. She would have been three or four at the time, her sister Mary two years younger, and it seems likely that Alison represents a composite of Haig-Brown's oldest two daughters.

The book opens with "at least"; two reasons why it is worth writing about Alison's fishing birds. First, "Alison's house beside the river ... is in just the right place to see birds."; And second, "Alison is a quick little girl who likes to watch birds as well as anything.";

But don't call Alison "a naturalist or bird watcher or anything dull like that!"; Alison doesn't "sneak and peer and creep"; about in search of bird life. She just loves to watch birds by the river.

One of those fishing birds, a "Water-ouzel,"; is a "very round and important and merry"; bird that "more proper people than Alison and her father"; know as a Dipper.

This small, unassuming grey bird beside the river is "never still ... [as] standing on the rock, without moving his feet, he bobbed his little round body up and down, bob, bob, bob. And with each bob there was a little flash of white as his eyelids came up to cover his eye. Bob, bob, bob, blink, blink, blink; bob-blink, bob-blink, bob-blink.";

Haig-Brown here refers to the American Dipper's extra eyelid, a nictitating membrane that allows it to see underwater. Whitefeatherson its eyelids cause the eyes to flash white as the bird blinks.

It's a description of an inconspicuous bird that many people, standing at the edge of a river, would barely notice, let alone describe in such simple yet exquisite language.

After the Dipper, Alison encounters the Kingfisher, who "laughed so loud"; and was "handsome all over,"; and the Heron, known as "old Walk-up-the-Creek.";

Then comes a chapter on Mergansers, which focuses on a secretive breeding pair who later emerge near the river with their round and fluffy ducklings.

The book closes with a final chapter on the Osprey, a bird "too bold and free for Alison to feel that she was friendly with him.";

Alison's Fishing Birds offers a chance to step back in time and a rare opportunity to sit near the Campbell River with Roderick Haig-Brown and his daughters. It's a story that affirms the power of watching and the lengthy, often daylong, attentive pondering of birds and their environment, just for knowledge, fun, and a sense of fulfillment.

Each bird encountered offers subtle teachings, not just on nature, but on the relationships between humans and the natural world.

Alison's Fishing Birds is as relevant for young people today as it was in the late 1930s for the Haig-Brown girls.

As Haig-Brown knew, the conservation ethos for most of us starts when we're young. He knew that instilling an appreciation of natural history in future generations is crucially important for the persistence of wildlife species and the wild spaces they depend on.

Perfect for bedtime stories or for reading on a window ledge overlooking a river, Alison's Fishing Birds should pique children's curiosity about birds and the natural world around them.

With a certain timelessness about it, this book can be enjoyed for generations to come.

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A coastal ecologist and conservation scientist from Vancouver Island,Dr. Caroline Fox is author of At Sea with the Marine Birds of the Raincoast (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016), which won the Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing and was shortlisted for the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for outstanding scholarly book on British Columbia, both in 2017.